Gross Dollar Retention (GRR) is a crucial metric for SaaS businesses when presenting to investors, showing how much revenue is retained from existing customers excluding upsells and expansions.
To calculate GRR, start with Beginning ARR, subtract Churned ARR and Downgraded ARR, then divide by Beginning ARR to get the percentage of revenue retained.
Key best practices for presenting GRR to investors include excluding upsells, segmenting by customer type, benchmarking against industry standards, showing trends over time, highlighting onboarding and customer success investments, and explaining variances.
Investors focus on GRR as a proxy for product-market fit and customer satisfaction, and a strong GRR indicates that the product is effective, customers are satisfied, and revenue is stable.